I'm new to Linux and just loaded it onto my Laptop.  However, I can't get any audio from it.
For instance when I load a CD I get the dialogue box saying;

Error playing CD.
Reason: Could not open audio device for playback.

And then the dialogue box;

Error playing CD.
Reason: Internal GStreamer error: state change failed.  Please file a bug at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GStreamer.

My Laptop details are;

HP Omnibook 6100 Model F3260K.
The sound card is, Sound Blaster compatible, ESS Maestro 3 sound card.

I've seen the following two pages on the web but neither talk about my exact model and I can't find the files the second one is talking about.

HP Omnibook 6100 Model F3851WT (http://www.nyx.net/~dwiebold/omnibook6100-linux.html)

Sound

The ESS Maestro 3 sound card is supported by the Linux kernel and works fine with 2.4.17. Modprobe maestro3 to run it. One might also pursue alsa but I have not done so on this box. Midi files sound good via timidity. 

HP Omnibook 6100 Model F3253W (http://www.rag.com.au/linux/6100howto.html#ac)

Audio Card:

The audio card in the laptop is an ESS Technology ES1988 Allegro-1 type which uses the "maestro3" driver that comes with most Linux distributions. I only needed to uncomment the line "sbin/modprobe maestro3" in the "/etc/rc.d/rc.modules" file for the driver to work. Next I added a few lines to the "/etc/modules.conf" file.

At the end of the file I appended the following:

# Sound card stuff...

alias char-major-116 snd

alias char-major-14 soundcore

alias snd-card-0 maestro3

alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

The sound card was now configured. When I next rebooted and KDE came up I was pleasantly surprised by a musical introduction.

More information can be found at "www.linux.org.uk/OSS".